Only just out of the paper bag and the first laptop has crashed, as far as I can see, irretrievably. And I don't know why. It has lost everything, including profiles, applications, the works, and it runs about as fast as I do these days. Frustration, anger, general pissedoffedness abounds. I have lost all previous messages, trip data and charts and all my stored email addresses. Almost raided the goodies bag, Kimbra!
So I'm up and running on the backup as long as this one keeps going.
Otherwise, a good day except for the East Coast current. I thought that we would be clear of the worst of it this far out, but we're still bashing into a couple of knots. Malcom, if you are out there, could you please work your magic and tell us how far out we have to go? It has cost us about 60 miles so far - the alternative would have been a rock hop to Brisbane and then out but I guess you cop what you sow.
I will keep a rough vmg going between noon positions, based on DTD - distance to Dutch. Starting DTD was 5819nm. Noon pos today was 2956.39.9 15455.26.3 DTD 5520nm, so vmg 299 and we're barely on schedule, but it does tell us that without the current we'd be way ahead, which is encouraging. Poled out all day, lovely sailing, almost no seabirds.
We spoke on the satphone to Leroy and Karen for Yuri's night. Interesting change of circumstances - when Pete and I first spoke to Leroy, he was up there hurtling around in his concatenation of tin cans and plumbers tubing and we were on a speaker phone in the Falklands, at Arlette Betts' house. This time, we were in the vee-hicle, by no means hurtling though, and Leroy and Karen were on the speaker phone.
I had a much more interesting set of ideas for this blog but the computer crash has rather fried my brain. Will work on unfrying it.
And we found the tin opener - had three others but tedious to leave the Rolls behind...
